Timber used in long lived products may be a form of carbon sequestration but you have to take into account the associated activities. These include diesel burned in harvesting and road building, sending split sawlogs to the chipper so they become paper, windrowing and burning of logging trash and loss of understorey plants which also absorbed carbon. Ideally by now we would have enough managed plantation timber to mimimise these other factors.

Plantation timber could go into laminated forms that could replace structural steel making further CO2 savings. Tourists dislike the sight of old growth logging. I agree we need a national plan that also takes into account water catchments and cute critters.

I’m now a believer that our Forrest’s should remain locked to all outside enterprises, including logging unfortunately.

The boogeyman is Globalism and it’s consequences combined with #..abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market#..# commonly known as
laissez-faire Capitalism or Neoliberalism.

Keeping the vandals associated with the disastrous consequences of those bogeymen, now plainly in sight in disaster of the housing market, might actually preserve the commons of the Forrest’s into the future, where more sane and less greed oriented goals may rule: And nothing to do with idiocy and ideology of the climate change fanatics.

Nothing and nobody can be trusted with this precious resource!

Build in wood and you need to worry about termites, fire and dry rot among other things. Given a choice between steel and timber for house frames, I'd elect steel every time, but particularly green steel. And leave the timber in the forest!

Furniture is different and doesn't require the clear felling of whole forests just to keep the building trades engaged. Not too many high rises use wood as the preferred framing material.

Moreover, furniture only requires selective felling which benefits the forest, which should be managed. Remember, wood stores carbon whether horizontal or vertical.
Alan B.

35 years ago I was living on 30 acres at Toogoom. A mate had a 240 acre property just up the road he was developing for organic farming. He had about 150 acres of tall straight gum trees the coppers log factory near by wanted for telegraph poles. They offered a reasonable price for the trees, & would clear the area removing all stumps ready for him to expand his farming area.

After a few acres had been so cleared the local greenie ratbags were up in arms, demanding he be stopped from developing his land. They demanded his "pristine native forest" be preserved. Fortunately his wife was a good researcher, & found plans from the 30s showing the 150 acre area had been clear felled in the 20s for pit props for the local Howard & Torbanlea coal mines.

The reason the trees were so tall & straight was they had grown at the same time competing for light. Under them was almost park like. The rest of the area was garbage scrub, of no use to man or native beast. Riding or walking through it you could easily see why the aborigines had continually burnt the bush to clear this muck. Clear felling was a real boon.

While only mentioning the minority use native forests are put to, such as "blackwood needed to build guitars", Mr Lambert fails to mention the majority use, "paper products", which quickly return carbon to the atmosphere. The unsustainable native forest logging mob has already taken 95% of the pie, now they want to argue about how much of the remaining bit do they get. Answer NONE!